Writing blueprint xml is quite verbose and large blueprint xmls are difficult to keep in sync with code changes and especially refactorings.
So you would like to do most declarations using annoations and ideally these annotations should be standardized.

The blueprint-maven-plugin allows to configure blueprint using annotations. It scans one or more paths for annotated classes and creates a blueprint.xml in target/generated-sources/blueprint/OSGI-INF/blueprint. So at runtime the bundle behaves like a normal blueprint bundle.
The generated blueprint can also be used together with a manually created blueprint file. So for example cxf services can be created in xml while most of the beans are automatically generated.

Whole plugin is written using 'plugin architecture', so your own annotations could be configured for bleuprint generation. All you need to do, is to implement one of interfaces from blueprint-maven-plugin-spi: